Rebuilding Rob

As WordPress continues to recycle old prompts, I pulled another prompt from The Coffee Monsterz Co to respond to today

What do you think you could have excelled at, if given the chance and resources when you were younger?

This is tough because this question is really asking me to re-examine my entire life in a way. I’m going to start with a more direct answer to this prompt, but then I’m probably going to go somewhat off tangent…

One thing that I think I may have excelled that when I was younger, and I really don’t think this would’ve actually gone anywhere, but I think back to when I was younger and I used to play “sandlot baseball” with my friends growing up in the neighborhood. As we are starting to get a little bit older and we were starting to play baseball with the neighborhood kids less often, I started trying to pitch. I am left-handed, and it seems like left-handed pictures have a little bit of a competitive edge at virtually every level of competitive baseball.

I’m not saying that I would’ve been any good, or then I would’ve actually gone anywhere with it, but sometimes I wonder if I had grown-up today instead of growing up in the 80s, if I would’ve tried to pursue baseball more than I did, how far I could’ve excelled with it. 

The world has changed. I don’t see kids playing “Parks and Recreation“ baseball, or softball or football or even soccer with their city rec, leagues like they used to do. Today, it seems like kids who really try to pursue the sports at all end up getting into private travel leagues. Both of my my youngest nephew, currently plays, travel baseball, and my older nephew played until he went to college.

I remember there being travel baseball leagues when I was a kid. Those were usually reserved for the “elite“ players; that is to say the best players that you know growing up.

We’re all told at some point in time that we can no longer play the children’s game, we just don’t… don’t know when that’s gonna be. Some of us are told at eighteen, some of us are told at forty, but we’re all told

• Moneyball

My oldest nephew was pretty good at baseball. In fact, he went to college on a partial baseball scholarship. He played for four years(or it may have actually even been five because of the Covid lockdowns). When he graduated from college,  he was done with the game. . I’ve never really talked to him a lot about it, but sometimes I wonder how he felt that it was coming to an end. Clearly he was a fine baseball player, but evidently he wasn’t major league material. I know for most athletes. It’s very difficult to walk away from a sports that they’ve given so much of their life too. 

There’s a great line in the movie Moneyball, where one of the scouts tells Billy Bean about baseball being “the child’s game“

And the whole quote of “the child’s game “goes beyond baseball. This can be said of any sport. Likewise, I think about this a lot in regards to kid 1. He got out of competitive gymnastics last January. X1 and I suspect that he got out because it was getting more competitive and he just didn’t want to push himself that much. I know for a fact that he was intimidated by bigger, stronger gymnast, who had been in the sport longer than he had. But the fact of the matter is, I know that the day-to-day wear and tear of doing gymnastics, was starting to take affect on his body. And, let’s face it. I don’t think he was going to go to the Olympics. That’s not a slam against my son, it’s just that he was simply not at that level, anymore than I was with baseball.

This may sound like I’m against kids being involved in sports. On the contrary, I think kids learn a lot of valuable lessons from sorts. Winning, losing and teamwork are the obvious ones. But I remember from my own experience with swimming in high school that the best lesson I took with me was a work ethic. Our coach made us keep at least a 3.0 GPA. We had to get weekly progress reports signed by our teachers. Keep in mind, this was before teachers grade books were kept electronically and students could access their work at any time.

The point being that even though I had less free time than ever – thanks to our morning and afternoon practices- the swim team kept me on my toes academically. It forced me to keep up with my work in order to remain academically eligible to compete.

Thanks for stopping by Rebuilding Rob. Be sure to like, 👍 comment and subscribe to my blog below. It’s greatly appreciated! Also, feel free to follow me on social media as well! Check out my most recent posts as well as some earlier, related posts:

• Rob Reacts… The Botched Executions of Christa Pike
• Blissful Ignorance vs. The Incontrovertible Truth 
• Knowing when to walk away 
• Rob Reacts: the Cornell University SA case
• The Teachers We Least Expect: Failure, Resilience, and Real Love

AI art courtesy of ChatGPT.

The article “The Child’s Game” first appeared on Rebuilding Rob.